


the worst of times, the best of times

by cynthia_arrow (thesilverarrow)



Series: Some Lost ficlets [8]
Category: Lost
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 10:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5740744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesilverarrow/pseuds/cynthia_arrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The first time Desmond read A Tale of Two Cities, he was fifteen. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	the worst of times, the best of times

**Author's Note:**

> (Originally posted to livejournal, 2010.)

Desmond never dog-eared the pages in his books. The ease of marking the page wasn't worth the crease left in the corner, the permanent mar of the wrinkle. Nobody taught him that it was wrong or bad; he just knew it as soon as he was old enough to know what books could be.  
  
The first time Desmond read _A Tale of Two Cities_ , he was fifteen. He read on the train a lot those days, so he always used ticket stubs as bookmarks, sometimes moving them from book to book. His mother teased him about his refusal to buy proper bookmarks, but to him they were as bad as dog-eared pages.  
  
It took him nine days to finish. It wasn't his first Dickens, but there was so much football one day, and through it all the set building for his school's overstaged production of _The Tempest_ , that he fell off his usual pattern of reading the entirety of a novel in one week.  
  
*  
  
When he was living the religious life, Desmond always found himself forced to explain his literature to his fellow monastics. It's not that secular reading was prohibited, just that the younger men had no use for relics of a world long gone, and the older men had long grown tired of their harsh truths. He was constantly explaining that the past is never gone, that literature is always alive with truth, which is a thing always worth pursuing.  
  
Despite the time on his hands, he didn't read much during his novitiate. He was encouraged to fill up his hours with contemplation. However, he found that he thought best after those chance times he'd decided to pick up a book. It was not a distraction or a clearing, but a focus – outward first, before he could see in again. He still wasn't exactly sure what he should be finding there.  
  
The day he learned he was not meant to be a monk, there was very little to take out of his cell, and most of it he left behind as belonging to a different life and the ones who still lived it. He thumbed through _Bleak House_ as he packed it away; he'd laid it aside so long ago he couldn't remember if the old train ticket kept an abandoned place or simply waited to be used as a bookmark again.  
  
Days later, after that car trip to Carlisle, after Penny asked after the book and he explained it to her, he took the ticket out and started at the beginning.  
  
*  
  
Desmond did not read much when he was out in the world again, remembering its pleasures and learning so many others he never knew, but what he did read was Dickens. Penny used to make fun of his small collection of raggedy secondhand paperbacks, but they held a prominent place on their shared bookshelves.   
  
"Really, Des, it's all so gloomy," she would say, kissing his forehead as she set a cup of coffee in front of him.   
  
Penny preferred George Eliot, could read _Middlemarch_ from cover to cover only to start again. Not that they quarreled, not about her overwhelming array of Romance novels and pretentious art history books and leather-bound collection of Shakespeare, and certainly not about the folded down corners she left in them all.   
  
They didn't, in fact, quarrel at all – not until it was too late for it to do any good.  
  
*  
  
On the _Elizabeth_ , out in the middle of a wide expanse of blue, Desmond mostly felt as alone as he believed he deserved to be. He hadn't earned what he wanted yet – not in the army, and not in this race – but he had faith he would. He had to.   
  
In the meantime, he had a large cast of Dickens characters to keep him company. He felt he could understand them much better now, seeing them individually, encountering them as if they were other souls adrift on the same sea. With the toils of keeping up the boat, he didn't have much time to read, but on clear afternoons, he would meditate over a few pages of _David Copperfield_.  
  
And he would meditate on Penny. She, too, was realer to him than she'd ever been. He was looking back over his own life like it was a novel, the kind with a protagonist the reader tends to fairly shout at, for all he makes such obvious missteps. He saw his quest, now, for what it was, not a mission of honor but the desperate arm-waving of a drowning man. The problem was there was no way to change the story of his past, only a harrowing way to correct his future's course in the last chapters.  
  
*  
  
It wasn't a book, then, down in that hole, down in the close air of the suffocating days of his 108-minute life. It was a prayer.  
  
If he'd had a direction before, a goal, now he had only a destination. That's the way he saw it: he would never leave the station, much less the island. He began to see that he'd built his life on the faulty premise that it would stretch out long in front of him, and when they way got dark, there would always be a light at the end of the tunnel. He didn't quite know how to live once he knew he'd always been wrong.  
  
At first, he kept to routines to keep himself sane. Schedules of eating and exercising, showering and shaving were a saving grace. It was possible to adapt to going through your day in 108 minute increments. The hard part was sleeping, and that's what eventually got to him.  
  
It wasn't a problem until after Kelvin was gone. Then, he had no relief, and he needed it more than ever. All there seemed to be was time to worry over all the things he would never have the time to change. He wasn't exactly haunted, not even by this man Kelvin, who had always seemed a little like a ghost to him, even before Desmond heard his skull crack against a rock, beside the taunting sea he hadn't seen since. Eventually, he was simply worn down with the lack of sleep as a refuge.  
  
So he took up books like never before, but they were cold comfort – impossible to engross himself in or else too engrossing, too likely to make him think too much. This time, he knew exactly what he would find in his heart when he looked into it. What he found was always a man seeking and never finding. He had never been good at facing the messier aspects of his own reality, so he had always sought for new realities to stage, to conquer, to live, or even just to absorb himself in reading, like during long overcast afternoons in his and Penny's flat, those rare slow times when he might've realized how his world was already all he could hope it to be, if he'd just take the time to confront it, and in doing so, confront himself.  
  
The cruel irony was learning this lesson all alone, with no hope of ever applying it. All that was left was to read the his last Dickens novel, and _Our Mutual Friend_ changed everything. What he found there wasn't rescue, but it was the beginning of the end. And as any reader of Victorian novels will tell you, things have to grow as tangled and dark as a jungle in order for the inevitable glimpse of the light to mean anything at all.  
  
*  
  
On the _Kahana_ , Dickens was not his constant, if he understood Farraday properly. Someone's discarded copy of _Great Expectations_ merely served as a distraction from the gnawing fear that he would lose his grip on time, on reality again.   
  
His constant was and had ever been Penny, and once he'd heard her voice again, he'd been sure that if he did slip away, he was so firmly tied to her that he'd drift back. So his impatience and frustration were worse than ever. He had a goal again, one that was still as impossible as spanning an ocean. But Penny would be spanning it, too. He was lucky she was both just as searching as he was and just as likely to pursue something until it was conquered.  
  
Things were not calm on their dark, wide sea, but things were calm in Desmond's soul. He could absorb himself in the exploits of Pip and Estella and Miss Haversham and the convict, and it didn't trouble his soul, just resonated in places it hadn't when he was a younger man, unable to realize how many subtle truths lay between the book's covers. To be honest, the truths were all that mattered now, not the water-stained covers or the many pages with creases that told of someone's dipping in and out of Dickens's time and reality, in between finding their own.


End file.
